I don't think it was very likely to have succeeded. Turkey's occupation of Cyprus remained a sticking point. Similarly, Turkey couldn't join without Greece agreeing, and that wasn't likely to happen. With these complications, it's difficult to imagine how Turkey was ever on track?

Sure, it's definitely something that can consciously or unconsciously alter the whole thing. That's why the methodology is so important. My point is that the biases of the experimenter should only be a point of criticism where their design permits these biases to colour their work.

The natural reaction from many in the peanut gallery is to immediately dismiss research because it comes from a source with which they disagree. While I'm not going to waste time reading controversial scientific claims from known cranks, or unqualified religious nuts, a reasonable hypotheses and a well designed study deserves a fair reading.

I ditched Yahoo in general because I was pretty unhappy with their support. The site had lots of circular links that seemed focussed on preventing you from actual contacting them for an issue not described on the site.

Bias is irrelevant. The methodology is either valid or invalid in relation to the hypothesis and the results. Are the findings supported by the evidence?

These are the only things that matter. The hypothesis is relevant only in relation to these concerns. What you're doing is something along the lines of poisoning the well or relying on ad hominem attacks. If there is bias, you can have a valid point if you show evidence for that bias in the study. And I'm very much open to the idea that there could be methodological flaws.

Yeah. This isn't a gender specific thing. If anything, it's reassuring to see a woman getting the opportunity to commit such a large financial deception.

What I wonder after reading this sorry story is: was Holmes aware that she was selling snake oil all along, or did she start out with the genuinely belief that her company could make the technology work? I'm willing to believe the latter: they did try, but the longer their breakthrough failed to materialize, the more they had to shift their efforts towards keeping up appearances, or "controlling the narrative" as it's called.

Good question. She probably did believe either it worked or that they would make it work. The article suggests an echo chamber, which is mind-bending in how it can reinforce what should be obviously bad beliefs. In all things, it pays to surround yourself with people willing to disagree and present good arguments.

For a good analogue, just look at the financial traders/gamblers who lose big by continuing to bet in the hopes of making up for their losses, where cutting their losses earlier would have made the situation far less severe.

I was on Reddit as this happened. It was a complete clusterfuck on the part of/r/news. One or more mods were deleting anything referencing the story. For those unfamiliar with Reddit,/r/news is a "default sub" - this means new users get automatically subscribed to it./r/news is effectively the main source of news on Reddit. The censorship meant that the attack simply wasn't on the front page for most of the day, and users were being banned for questioning the censorship.

The mods created a "megathread", where supposedly people could go to discuss the story. They began with a sticky, suggesting people leave the sub if they want to complain about censorship, and proceeded to delete fucking everything in the megathread. See https://r.go1dfish.me/r/news/c...

In that link, the comments in red are those that were deleted. The mods claimed these comments broke the rules, yet a cursory glance shows that this is not the case. Instead they censored because they didn't want another story of Islamic terrorism. It was insane that a Trump sub and/r/AskReddit ended up breaking the news on the front page. For added bonus points, on the mods was busy arguing with people in another sub where the censorship was called out, where this mod was a complete wanker. In one of the posts, their response is to tell someone to "kill yourself". http://i.imgur.com/UFlsuHV.png

It will never be as big as/r/News but it'll hopefully not fall to censorship. The/r/news mods should be fucking ashamed of themselves and they continue to avoid addressing the issues. Because of them, one of the largest terrorist attacks in recent US history went unreported for the best part of a day - all because of political correctness.

Yup. People devote their limited time on this planet to watching TV shows where people just sit around in a house and have inane conversations. They pay to watch people chase a small ball from one of the field to the other. Some consider it a week well spent grinding every night for some imaginary item in a game. And some consider it entertaining and worthwhile to go protest for the social justice cause of the week.

Not necessarily. You don't casually arrest the leading presidential candidate of a party and former Secretary of State without being pretty sure you're doing the right thing. What do you think would happen if the FBI arrested Clinton right now and then, after some months of investigations, released her? It'd almost certainly alter the outcome of the elections and would be a career ending move for a lot of people.

I don't know if she is guilty or not. My point is more that we can't take a lack of an arrest as an admission of anything. It doesn't matter if she received nothing marked as classified. Her position was of a highly sensitive nature where non-classified materials could be damaging if leaked. What we do know is that she was highly irresponsible. What we don't know is the extent to which she was irresponsible and if laws were broken.

Christianity does not oppress women. It treats women as having the same value as men in the eyes of God, and having just as much responsibility and accountability as men. This does not mean that some televangelist somewhere isn't a jerk, or that some small-town preacher isn't only reading Bible verses that tell women to behave in some particular way, only that the faith itself and its scriptures in their entirety and in-context do not teach the oppression of women.

unless, of course, you were pretending that not treating men and women as interchangeable gears in a machine is equivalent to "oppressing" women; Christianity does indeed teach that men and women are different and have different roles, but it does not teach that women are the property of men as Islam does, or that the word of a woman is equal to one forth of the word of a man in legal proceedings as Islam does, etc. Husbands are not wives and wives are not husbands. Mothers are not fathers and fathers are not mothers. If you don't like those basic biological facts, then your argument is with reality.

Oh yeah, equal value. It just happens that women are notably absent from historical church leaders, and not permitted to be priests in the largest denominations. It's one thing to have different roles that are complimentary. It's quite another to simply say only men can occupy these positions for no reason other than gender. The Mormons get flak for having forbidden blacks to become leaders in churches, yet the Catholic church does exactly the same thing on the basis of gender. That's their choice, and I'd defend that. I just wouldn't be so dishonest as to claim that Christianity isn't practicing gender discrimination. The bloody thing begins with a woman leading a man astray, and that's a recurring theme. And that women, depending on which creation story you read, was created merely as company for the man.

Christianity says nothing (no matter what one church led by a guy called a Pope may wish) about controlling CONCEPTION. So we're not really arguing about not conceiving a child, but rather about killing a child that has already been conceived. Christians generally are opposed to abortion, not as a form of oppression of women, but rather because a baby is not part of a woman's body; it's another individual human being and Christianity generally frowns upon the murder of innocents. Christianity also explicitly forbids child sacrifice, unlike most other religions in human history. Killing a child for economic reasons, or social reasons, etc is no different from ancient pagans throwing their children into a pagan fire.

I'd agree that prohibitions on contraception are largely a Catholic thing, but aren't Catholics the single largest Christian denomination worldwide by a long margin?

Perhaps you see opposition to prostitution as "oppression". Well, it's generally not as "victimless" as portrayed; it creates a marketplace for the abuse of women, puts a price tag on all women, deprives any woman of the right to claim to be unemployed, and endangers women whose men cheat on them with prostitutes and bring home a few biological surprises. Women whose husbands give them a case of herpes or worse tend to feel a bit oppressed. For most of the past 2000 years, these things were considered advancements over the positions of nearly all other belief systems in human history where women were often presumed to be little more than bi-pedal farm animals.

Women had value because men wanted them and they could product offspring. Offspring in those times were both a retirement plan and your legacy. It's no wonder there were moves to protect women.

This is fundamentally different from the religion of Islam which explicitly values women as less than men, makes them property, denies them basic freedoms (including things like medical care in primitive locations like Afghanistan where it is practiced strictly and women are forbidden from being with a man other than a relative, and no women are allowed to be educated). Christianity also supports monogamy, which is a much better form of married life for most women than polygamy and spends more time teaching men to treat the women in their lives properly than it spends telling women to behave, so does that make it "oppressive" to men?

There's no denying that Islam is leaps and bounds more backwards than Christianity. But if Christian sects have advanced it is in fits and starts and comes by reasoning away scripture.

The Bible is quite clear. Women are made for men ( 1 Corinthians 11:8-9) and women should be subservient to their husbands and fathers.

Sure you can look at 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 and apologise it away, claiming that this was for a specific group of noisy women at the church in Corinth, but then how have people misunderstood this completely differently for so long?

And Peter 3:1?

"Likewise, ye wives, be in subjection to your own husbands; that, if any obey not the word, they also may without the word be won by the conversation of the wives;"

There's no arguing that Christianity is more modernised than Islam. I don't like either of the religions, but I'd sure as hell rather live in a modern Christian country than a modern Muslim country. And most modern Christians have adapted beliefs that kind of ignore the old teachings. Men and women to tend to have different roles and drives, which explains most of the gender pay gap, but the difference is that we do not forbid women from adopting traditionally male career paths. Most women could not beat me in an arm wrestle, but I know some can and I see no reason to exclude them from trying.

Your take on these different roles is close to the "separate but equal" doctrine than any modern understanding of equality. Christianity values men and women very differently, and I'm fine with that. Let them do what they want in their club, but don't lie and claim that it is not so.

Sadly, you're right. We certainly saw Atheism go down the shitter with Atheism Plus, which injected identity politics in to the mix. Look at the crazy-eyed social justice fundamentalism that sprung from the same source and is causing inane protests in campuses around the US.

People don't have to be atheists to be calm and rational, and atheists aren't necessarily either of those things. What matters is that people can think calmly and rationally about stuff that really matters to us and that we don't become arbitrarily aggressive towards people who hold views different to our own. It happens that religion is pretty commonly mixed up with movements where people commit terrible acts and believe themselves to be beyond reproach, but the same is true of various left and right wing nutter groups. What matters is rationality and basic fucking empathy towards fellow humans.

There are lots of things that can't simply be controlled for. Dating for a while before getting engaged and married is a good idea because you really get to know your would-be spouse (gotta make it through the holidays at least once with your potential future in-laws!) but guys who are focused on their partner's appearance and women who focus on their partner's money are more likely to get divorced? Is that a convoluted way of saying "Don't obsess over things about your partner you can't control?"

The quotes in the summary say that couples who elope are 12.5x more likely to get divorced than couples who get married in ceremonies with 200+ people, but they also say that the more you spend on your wedding, the more likely you are to get divorced. How much do they think a 200+ person wedding costs??

Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it also reminds me of a quite from Decisive by Chip and Dan Heath: "Experts are pretty bad at predictions. But they are great at assessing base rates."

And now on the regular website I click "Account" to look for a way to delete my account, and all it does is darken the page. Tried in Firefox and it loaded, and of course there's no way to delete the account. To hell with this.

I click links in my email notifications and have to scroll down to read the actual post, and now I was writing a comment which got lost. I wrote my comment, clicked the "login to post" button, and on logging in it brings me to the home page and loses my post. Jesus Christ monkey balls!

It's been a fun few years, but it's now at an end. This is no-longer funny.

If you hire someone to send in the requests, then they are allowed to trust that you are making the request in good faith. Their's no penalty to you for lying to them. So nobody violates the law, and you can accomplish the same goal. But you probably do want to use incorporated safety nets, so that the target of the takedown notice can't get anything by suing you. So you're likely to need a lot of throw-away corporations. Each one, of course, should have it's own letterhead. (Why fake someone else's letterhead, anyway. It's not as if it's difficult to mock up a letterhead with the Gimp, Simple Scan, and Inkscape. Takes a couple of hours for the first one, and 10 minutes for each change.

You might want to seek legal advice before attempting this. Get a photo of the lawyer's face on hearing your plan.

But, IIUC, the DMCA makes no requirement that the originator of the takedown request has a good-faith reason to believe that it is correct, merely that the person who files the request has a good-faith reason. And it is quite apparent that lawyers are always filing requests for someone else that have no validity or plausibility, and which they have reason to know have no validity. And NONE have ever been prosecuted. (Well, I've never heard of any being prosecuted.)

Prosecution is pretty rare. Still, if you have a person acting on your behalf, claiming you can act in bad faith is like saying you can get away with burglary if you manage to convince some else to break in to a house under the pretence that it's your house and you forgot your keys. Again, suggest this to the lawyer and check their facial expressions. The consultation will cost money, but the resulting photos could form a new meme!